But despite the fact that Soderbergh was eager to have Redford mentor him, he insisted on doing the projects in the order they were presented to him. He told Maltby that Redford would have to get in line behind Pollack and now maybe even Johnson. The Wildwood folks were flabbergasted. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, The Last Ship, a Cold War drama, came down with it; and Kafka moved up a slot. There was something Kafkaesque about Soderbergh fastening on this project as his next film, something self-destructive, as if he were doing penance for the undeserved success of sex, lies. “I was going to get my head handed to me on my second film, pretty much no matter what I did,” he explained. “That’s what I was prepared for. In a way, I decided I would go out in flames by making a film that really had a big red bull’s-eye on its chest.”
Anticipating disaster, Soderbergh courted it. Years later, Soderbergh’s pal and partner George Clooney speculated that the director suffered from a fear of success.
Redford was not happy about having to wait out Kafka. The rumor mill was saying that Soderbergh had decided not to do King of the Hill after all. Every once in awhile, Maltby would put it to him, and he’d say, “Don’t you trust me? I told you, it’s my next picture, and it will be my next picture.”
Soderbergh was looking for an actress to cast in Kafka. Peter Gallagher recalled that he had once appeared in a Clifford Odets play with Betsy Brantley, Alison’s sister, and recommended her for the part. The role eventually went to Theresa Russell, but Soderbergh had found a new girlfriend. In a flagrant case of life copying art, he moved from Alison and took up with Betsy. She was seven years older than he, but he liked “mature” women, he said, who didn’t need him to complete their lives. Betsy explained herself in the press: “He liked to bowl. So it means he had to be kind of real.”
Meanwhile, the August release date of sex, lies, and videotape was approaching like an onrushing train, and Miramax set about preparing the marketing materials. Recalls Deutchman, “Their marketing instincts were always towards going for the jugular, which in this case meant sex, sex, sex. Steven was horrified. He felt Miramax was promising way more than the movie delivered.” Adds Liz Manne, who then worked for Deutchman, “It was an exploitative Miramax thing, titillating, with the implication that the tapes were home porn tapes. It crossed the line.”
The marketing meetings were tense. Soderbergh sulked, and Harvey looked like he was barely keeping himself under control. When the director stalked out of the room, steaming, Harvey threw up his hands in frustration, saying, “How are we supposed to sell this movie? This is completely unrealistic.” His attitude was, It’s our money, it’s our film, I don’t give a shit what the director thinks. These people will love us if the film does well, and if it doesn’t, so what. There’s always another one. But Harvey had a lot invested in sex, lies, more than just money, and when Soderbergh asked him if he could try his own version of the trailer, he said, “Yes.” Soderbergh delivered a cut that Harvey hated, dismissed as “art house death.” With Deutchman thrusting his body between the two—“I helped keep them from killing each other”—they reached a compromise: Miramax’s structure with some of Soderbergh’s clip selections.
Soderbergh had had it with instant fame—“Everybody wants to know me,” he complained. On July 9, he dumped his Palme d’Or in the trunk of his Rambler and headed into the desert east of L.A. bound for Charlottesville, Virginia, driving at night so his car wouldn’t overheat. Says Alison, “Steven’s one of those people who has difficulty being happy where he’s living. If he’s living in L.A., he’s wants to live in New York. If he’s living in New York, it’s, I guess I better go to L.A.” His family had once lived in Charlottesville, and he had pitched a no-hitter there when he was eight years old. “He wanted to go back to where he had that moment of joy,” Alison continues. “But ultimately, he can’t really enjoy life.” As Soderbergh has since admitted, “There’s a difference between experiencing success on the scale I had it on sex, lies, and wanting it. I didn’t expect it, and I didn’t want it. When sex, lies happened, I martyred myself out of enjoying it. And you know, it’s disingenuous and borderline offensive not to enjoy it.”
Miramax premiered sex, lies on August 4, 1989, in what turned out to be a clever bit of counterprogramming—the summer blockbusters were winding down, and audiences who weren’t brain dead by that time were hungry for something to chew on. The response was so enthusiastic that at the after party, Soderbergh felt like he was having an out-of-body experience. He confided to his diary, “I think the reason a lot of suddenly successful people get screwed up is because they think they should feel better and be happier, and when they aren’t, they think there must be something wrong with themselves, so they indulge in self-destructive behavior. What has happened to me is really great, but I don’t feel any happier personally than I was eighteen months ago. I think it’s a bad idea to tie your self-image to your perceived success in the film business. Could make one bitter.”
To break the big-city, $10 million barrier, an independent has to play the suburban multiplexes. Zeidman had blazed a path with Scandal, and sex, lies followed where Scandal led. “Up to that point, and even today, there are a lot of people distributing films, like the guys at Sony Classics, who think film is holy,” reflects Jack Foley. “The films were cloistered in the Orson Welles in Cambridge or the Landmark Theaters or the Laemmles in L.A. You didn’t put art films in certain theaters, because you bastardized them, you commercialized them. Like malls. It was a dimwitted, stupid, elitist point of view. Until Marty Zeidman said, ‘Stop this preciousness and let’s go. Whore of Babylon or not, this is a business. Let’s make money.’ Harvey molded art film into smart film. But they would have never had the success that they did without Marty breaking the rules.”
“It was like pouring water on the floor,” says Zeidman. “How far will it expand? You don’t know, it just kept going and going.” Driven by the ambition of the Weinsteins and the media’s hunger for something new and different, sex, lies did no more than a handful of exclusive engagements before it went wide to every major city on five hundred, six hundred screens. “It played everywhere, Corpus Christi, cities that never played specialized movies before, theaters that wouldn’t have normally played a specialized movie,” Zeidman continues. “But you can never [over]estimate exhibitor greed. When they saw the numbers, they jumped all over it.” The expanding release pattern was accompanied with an expensive publicity blitz. Says Bingham Ray, up to that point “you’d take a four inch ad on opening day, and people would notice it. You could open a film in New York for $15,000, all in. You wouldn’t think to advertise an independent or a foreign language film on TV. It was strictly in print. Or if you were really adventurous and had a little more money to spend, classical radio. With sex, lies, Harvey started to spend advertising dollars on TV.” Larry Estes adds, “To earn $25 million—you don’t do that with a million bucks. They spent over $2.5 million in P&A. They went crazy with publicity.” In addition to the $24.7 million domestic gross, sex, lies did another $30 million worldwide.
Soderbergh was delighted with the Weinsteins. He said at the time, “I’m stunned with how deeply they were able to penetrate with the film. They’re willing to go out there and pound the pavement. The amount of money they made compared to the P&A cost is amazing.” The beauty of Miramax was that when everything was going right, it offered the best of both worlds, giving the films the tender loving care indie distributors excelled at and spending big money buying the TV spots. But everything didn’t always go right. Harvey and Bob were like the little girl in the Mother Goose tale: when they were good they were very very good, but when they were bad they were awful.
REDFORD’S 1988 CHRISTMAS LETTER to staffers appeared to mark the nadir of the institute’s fortunes, but things would get worse, and soon. Festival head Safford left what seemed like a sinking ship in 1990 and moved on to New Line; Geoff Gilmore, who arrived in April 1990, succeeded Safford but had little to do with that year’s
festival. Held under the cloud of the management meltdown and plunging morale, it represented a distinct falling off from the previous year. In the absence of another sex, lies, Sundance clung to Soderbergh himself, who headed the jury for dramatic films and was fast becoming something of a poster boy for the festival, allowing himself to be used in its promos. This festival became known as the Afro-American year for Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger and the Hudlin brothers’ House Party, which went on to become a big hit for New Line. Other standouts included Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth, which had been picked up by Miramax that September in Toronto, and Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan.
Certainly, Sundance needed another sex, lies badly, and soon. The mediocrity of the festival seemed to confirm Redford’s worst fears. As Gilmore remembers it, “There was a sense of one step forward, two steps back to the old days, where independent film was largely anonymous and marginal.” Ironically, the turnaround was to come quickly, but in the dark days of 1990, no one could see around that corner, especially not Sundance, which concluded, in effect, that its mission was a failure. From the beginning, Redford had worried that indies were, well, too damn indie. Sounding like he was ready to give up, he reflected, “Maybe it’s time to say, ‘Are we making a mistake using the word ‘independent’ quite so much? Should we not just say, ‘Film is film’?” He had tried to use the carrot of production money to lure unruly filmmakers onto the straight and narrow of commercial production, but that failed, and he concluded that there were just not enough big fish swimming in the indie pond. Frank Daniel, who was running the labs, added his voice to the growing chorus, complaining, with a sigh, “There aren’t that many independents that have talent.” Thus, the institute began to favor “transitional” or “crossover” directors, which is to say, celebrities who had made their mark in areas other than filmmaking and were itching to try their hand at directing—over the “emerging” first-or second-time filmmakers who had repeatedly disappointed Redford with their clumsy efforts and disregard for his advice. Making no secret of his distaste for emerging filmmakers, Daniel continued, “The transition people are better. A guy who’s spent years in theater has a better eye for a good story, a better sense of structure and character than filmmakers or screen-writers. They come with better projects.” Embarrassed by its failure to produce either a succèss d’estime or a commercial hit, the institute was ready to turn its back on the indies it was created to serve.
Daniel, of course, was speaking nonsense. As director and sometime resource person Ulu Grosbard (True Confessions) pointed out at the time, even if it’s true that your average playwright is a better writer than your average screenwriter—which is debatable—“the very thing that makes them good playwrights makes them bad screenwriters. The rules are different and the language is different.” Putting his finger on one of the flaws at the heart of Sundance, he continued, “Trying to get away from commercial filmmaking, people are looking to good literature, but I’d much rather see a good pulpy genre film that’s really well done than an attempt to do War and Peace that’s flat.”
Redford hired Suzanne Weil, a former PBS factotum, to succeed Tom Wilhite. In Weil, Redford presumably hoped to find a more pliable director, but once again he demonstrated his flair for hiring the wrong person. She was the opposite of Wilhite. By many accounts, she was an indifferent administrator, but she did nurture her relationship with Redford, as well as a group of “transitional” filmmakers who included such unlikely candidates as Carl Bernstein, Martha Clarke, Twyla Tharp, and Peter Weller, aka Robocop. (None of them ever did manage to make a notable film.)
Safford was a gifted programmer, but paradoxically, his most significant contribution may well have been recruiting Gilmore as his successor. Gilmore came from the Cinematèque at UCLA. With an academic background, he was not an insider. “I wasn’t all that impressed with American independent cinema,” he recalls, “especially the granola cinema practiced by Sundance.” Gilmore couldn’t have come at a worse time. The 1990 festival earned $617,000 against expenses of $546,000, for a net profit of a mere $71,000. A couple of months after he arrived, the fiscal storm broke over the institute, drenching it in red ink. The program directors were called into a meeting, told they could each keep one person, fire the rest. Staff size was abruptly cut by 50 percent, down from 35 to 12 or 13. The budget was slashed by nearly 50 percent, from about $2.7 million to approximately $1.55 million.
Later that year, Redford returned from the Havana production in Santo Domingo to find that the Sundance deficit had skyrocketed. “I just couldn’t have it,” he said, and fired Weil. Weil claimed she was unpopular because she tried to make changes. “I had a chance to mess it up,” she confessed, “but I didn’t have the chance to put it together again.”
Once again, Sundance was adrift. Says Pollack, who was present at the creation and probably has known Redford longer than anybody, “It wasn’t passive aggressive—it was more healthy than that—it was an ambivalence about wanting to dominate it himself and wanting to let go and let somebody [else] run it.” As the institute’s tenth anniversary approached in 1991, it was questionable whether Redford’s baby would survive. Corporate sponsors were pressured to pay cash on the barrelhead lest the institute miss its payroll. The star complained, bitterly, “No matter how hard you try, somebody gets pissed off. It’s time now for me to step back and see if this thing can go on its own or not. If it can’t, it shouldn’t.” He paused. “I’d hate to think that ten years of my life have been wasted. If you say there’s a leadership problem at Sundance, it’s my responsibility to find someone who will run it. I haven’t done it. It’s as simple as that. But there’s somebody who has moved into the picture right now who I think has a very good concept for raising a lot of money: Gary Beer.”
Beer swept away what was left of the old guard, but the bloodletting further eroded morale. Competition programmer Alberto Garcia spoke for many when he said, “I would wish, if I’d spent years of my life with a nonprofit arts organization, to get a nice good-bye instead of a hefty boot. I find it highly ironic that the institute was created to shelter independent film-makers from the lawyers and the money people so that they could focus strictly on the material, yet now Sundance is being run by those same people, the bean counters.”
Surveying the wreckage, Redford tried to figure out how it had gone so wrong. Increasingly, he came to see himself as a drag on Sundance and Sundance as a drag on him. “A lot of people were talking about what an asset I was,” he complained at the time. “I began to see it differently, that I was a distorting force, a liability. If someone says this guy is a dilettante, and he’s out there in Utah trying to use this as some tax write-off, then they weren’t going to be anxious to contribute. So I purposely tried to step back, because I didn’t think it was healthy. Some people view that as schizophrenic leadership. That’s not true. It’s been conscious. I decided three years ago that I’ve got to go back to doing my own work. There are things I want to do and films I want to make. In the ’70s, I made fourteen, fifteen films, and only four in the ’80s. It was never my intention to quit my career and run Sundance.”
Pace Pollack, many regard the star precisely as a passive aggressive, with a genius for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The final scene of The Candidate is vintage Redford. His character has won a grueling race for senator from California, but his last words are a querulous, “What do we do now?” as the camera holds on an empty hotel room looking for the there there. Concludes Van Wagenen, “Bob would have liked nothing better than for the institute to have worked without him. Gradually, it became clear that he was the lynchpin. He realized he would have to get involved in a central role. He got a lot more than he bargained for.”
Meanwhile, Redford was impatiently waiting for Soderbergh to start work on King of the Hill. Soderbergh had showed up at the resort for the producers’ workshop the previous August with the rest of the sex, lies gang. He told Estes that he was going to marry Betsy Bran
tley, and he did, in December 1989, before a justice of the peace in Charlottesville. The two seemed to be very much in love. A few months later, Soderbergh was shooting Kafka and thinking about his next film. Redford expected it to be King of the Hill. But Soderbergh still felt he owed Pollack a picture. While he was in post-production on Kafka, he was summoned by Redford to his bungalow at Universal. Redford was 45 minutes late, and since there was no one in the building, the young director sat patiently on the cement steps outside. As Soderbergh recalls the meeting, Redford said, “I understood that you might do another film before King of the Hill.”
“Yeah, I might.”
“I’m just wondering if I should carry on with this project, because I can’t get a read on whether you still want to do it.”
Soderbergh felt his stomach turn over. He thought, This is really strange, because they approached me, and I suggested that book. This wasn’t a project they generated. It sounded to him like Redford was making a threat. “The question Redford was asking was, ‘Should I do this with you or without you?’ ” Soderbergh replied, “No, I fully intend to do this. But these things aren’t always quantifiable. All I can tell you is I absolutely intend to make this movie. I’m not bullshitting you. I’m not playing a game.”
“Fine.”
But Soderbergh left the meeting with an uneasy feeling, especially since Redford now owned the rights to King of the Hill.
HARVEY HAD PICKED UP Cinema Paradiso at Cannes in May of 1989. Nobody else wanted it. Directed by Guiseppe Tornatoro, it had already bombed in Italy the previous year, where it ran at a mind-numbing two-and-one-half hours plus. Most buyers were not in the habit of recutting pictures, so they just sat on their hands. Harvey was not so finicky. At the time, he maintained a primitive post-production facility that edited trailers and TV spots but also cut and revoiced. The brothers were so strapped they worked directly on the release prints, cutting and pasting, but in later days, when the company had become more prosperous, they reshot or added scenes to films that the directors who made them considered finished. The Weinsteins hired kids out of NYU film school, paid them nothing, told them Miramax was their graduate school.
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